Tales of catastophe, sex and squalor from the Alpine Underbelly...

Belle de Neige

Saturday, 2 April 2011

How to steal your doppleganger's boyfriend...

Don’t think I’ve been neglecting you, dears. Quite the contrary in fact. I think of you constantly. The truth is I have been a little distracted of late by something which I am indisposed to divulge…no I am not pregnant. I have not discovered the link between Quantum and Newtonian physics…it’s far more exciting than that. I shall keep you posted on ‘The Thing’…

…but until then, yes, there are a few things I really should fill you in on, I mean, it’s practically bloody summer.

First of all -don’t come here. Not if you want to ski anyway. It’s very green, the birds are tweeting, and unless you fancy sweating your tits off in your best North Face jacket on a muddy hillside in eighteen degree heat for a week, having spent 250 Euros on a ski pass you can’t really use, then I can think of better holiday opportunities. Not that it isn’t beautiful…

It is the lot of the resort manager to do a mid-week chalet visit. That’s where you potter around all the chalets asking guests (who are not interested in talking to you whatsoever and wish you’d bugger off and leave them alone) how there holiday has been. (I like to schedule my visits around canapé time, in the hope of a free glass of champagne… but of course.) Anyway I went to visit some guests yesterday evening – a rather miserable bunch of Welsh tossers, to be honest. When I asked if there was anything I could do for them the mother actually turned round in her chair, looked at me accusingly and said:

‘Well, we could do with a bit more snow’

I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t and continued to look at me expectantly while I stood there in my cheap company jacket trying to think of something less rude to say than:

‘Oh here we go…that old chestnut. Do I look like Thor to you? Or Geoff The God of Precipitation? And if I could control the fucking weather, do you think I’d be standing here like a knob talking to you? No love. I’d be a billionaire. I’d be lying on a bed of rose petals in a palace made of chocolate, full of naked Christian Bale look-alikes, while they peel me grapes, and pleasure me on demand with their enormous spam javelins. Now fuck off and if you want snow book your holiday during winter instead of spring. ’

Due to the social unacceptability of sunglasses, most of the seasonaires have a ridiculous tan that stops halfway up their face. They have also all developed season psychosis. All the pistes are closing and hot on their heels are the bars, leaving them with not much to do but work, complain about work and then flit from closing party to closing party wearing ridiculous fancy dress outfits and emergency shagging each other.

There is one bar, the closing of which always seems to produce the most alarming behaviour in everyone – mainly because it is the hub of the resort and signifies the beginning of the end. Invariably it descends into a borderline orgy with a crap DJ, where every last seasonaire in the resort is crammed into a tiny space, rubbing themselves against each other and pouring spirits down their throats straight from the bottle. It is a time to break the glass on your emergency shag candidate, or if you’ve been mooning over someone all winter, take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and ram your tongue down their eighteen-year-old throat.

It could also be because the managers publicise it as a ‘drink the bar dry’ challenge and also because it is preceded during the day time by the Three Valley Rally.

The 3VR is a scavenger hunt and a spectacle to behold. While punters and the French look on in utter horror and disbelief, British seasonaires dress up in things like cow costumes and ski to various checkpoints where other seasonaires make them do hideous things like perform unmentionable sex acts and drink each other’s piss. I was on one of these check points. Our victims were made to strip off and run around in their underpants in the snow while being pelted with snow balls force-fed chartreuse. Fairly tame really. If one wanted to do a decent forfeit one would simply take a silver tray, a rolled up fifty and a large bag of ketamine up the mountain and make them all do a line each. Fifty seasonaires flying around with planks of wood nailed to their feet on horse tranquilizer. That would fuck shit up. But not everyone’s as forward thinking as me…

Anyhoodle. Suffice to say, as we lay, groaning in bed the following morning the events of the evening gradually came back to us. SbH woke up with a mysterious black eye and a bruised sternum, having thrown a kebab across the road, cried, asked my ex boss if we could borrow his Land Rover to drive home and then told him to fuck off when he said no. He also got chased by the police. He was feeling a little jaded.

I, in turn, slowly remembered with shame that I had…

…been girlishly and shamefully impressed by Mini SbH’s ability to pick me up as if I was a dried leaf…done a pill…snogged Calamity…buckaroo’d Bill…put my hands down the Vagabond's pants …smooched my doppleganger’s boyfriend…been chased by the police

In closing, I must say that my doppelganger turned out to be a disappointment. All season people have been telling me that there is some bird wondering around with my face, and when I finally met her at said party I was really quite excited. She was leaning on the bar with her back to me.

‘Look!’ said H, ‘It’s HER! It’s your doppleganger’, and we proceeded to try to get a sneaky snap of her with me behind doing a thumbs up.

I decided to try to chat to her, ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘This is amazing – everyone thinks we look like twins’

She was clearly wankered and looked at my sidelong with acute displeasure, before slurring something about taking a piss and stumbling off through the crowd. What a miserable cow. I am quite insulted that she has had the chutzpah to steal my face and then wander about being a cunt with it and having the personality of a nun’s fart. How dare she give me the brush off? Do you know who I am?

I did however get my own back when I turned to the quite handsome chap next to me afterwards and said, ‘Well, she’s a bit of a cow. Apparently I look like her’.

‘Yes you do,’ he said. ‘She’s my girlfriend’

‘Ah. Ooops’

He put his hands on my waist and planted a drunken, slobbery kiss on my mouth…

‘Actually, you’re much fitter’

He then tried to kiss me again. I politely declined his advances, of course. But couldn’t help feeling smug. Even if he was off his tits.

The smugness was somewhat allayed the next morning when I told SbH the story...

‘Doppleganger!?’ he said,‘Why didn’t you tell me? We could have had a threesome!’

I do actually quite like this idea. I'd essentially be shagging my boyfriend and myself. Which appeals to my narcissistic nature. According to Wikipedia, the font of all bollocks, a doppelganger is ‘a tangible double of a living person … that typically represents evil’ …so question: